Established 2014 · London
Ravelstein
Rare Books, Signed First Editions & Letters
RG
❦ ❦ ❦
Biography
French

Romain Gary

1914 — 1980

Romain Gary was a French diplomat, filmmaker, and novelist who is the only writer to have won the Prix Goncourt twice — once under his own name for The Roots of Heaven (1956) and once under the pseudonym Émile Ajar for The Life Before Us (1975). The dual identity was a literary hoax revealed only after his death.

Past sales0
PeriodModern
NationalityFrench
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Romain Gary (1914–1980) was born Roman Kacew on 21 May 1914 in Vilnius, Lithuania. He moved to France as a teenager, became a Free French aviator in World War II, and served as a French diplomat.

Life and Career

Les Racines du ciel (The Roots of Heaven, 1956) — about a man who wages a one-man campaign to save the elephants of French Equatorial Africa — won the Prix Goncourt. La Promesse de l’aube (Promise at Dawn, 1960) — his memoir about his relationship with his mother — is his most beloved book.

Feeling dismissed by the French literary establishment, Gary created the pseudonym Émile Ajar and published Gros-Câlin (1974) and La Vie devant soi (The Life Before Us / Momo, 1975) — about a young Arab boy raised by an aging former prostitute and Holocaust survivor in Paris — which won the Prix Goncourt. The Ajar identity was revealed only after Gary’s suicide in 1980.

Major Works and Themes

Gary wrote about love, idealism, the persistence of hope, and the human comedy. His double career is one of the great literary deceptions of the twentieth century.

Key Works

  • The Life Before Us (1975)
  • Promise at Dawn (1960)

Collecting Gary

French originals (Gallimard) are the primary collected form. Émile Ajar editions are separately collected. English translations bring $10–$30. Gary died in 1980.